SpacePad - a lap-top/desk-top Frankentroller

[Dan Efran]

I recognize the worlds largest carousel one. House on the Rock, baby! 

Yep.



I had never heard of the place, but apparently it's an extravaganza of strangeness. I guess I'd better check it out someday.

[Dan Efran]

Tuesday I added an LED for the coin button.

The MiniPAC doesn't have dedicated LED control lines like some of its bigger siblings. (It does have some control inputs than can double as LED outputs. At least I think that's what the docs say. I haven't tested that.)

But I just needed an always-on LED, and the analog-input lines on the board - which I wasn't using at all - include some +5v and ground lines. So I just used a pair of those, with a very bright red LED and a fairly strong resistor (to protect it from overloading, and to bring the brightness down to something appropriate.)



I wired all that up with some female-to-female header-hugging jumper wires I found at Radio Shack. About like this:

http://www.radioshack.com/schmartboard-7-female-jumpers-10-with-headers-40/2760151.html

That let me set up the LED without soldering anything, and I can change out the resistor easily if I decide to tweak the brightness further. (It's still kinda bright.)



I'd wired up the microswitches for the coin button and for the coins, but they were just dangling around loose. Now I hotglued them into positions that I hoped were close to correct. (I had to bend the lever on the coin reject button's microswitch, so that the button's protruding tab would engage it at the right rate, from the right angle and distance.)

I still wasn't sure what to use for the coin box. While I was at the store, I bought a little travel pack of Q-tips for a dollar, that looked like it might be the right size. Might work....

[jmike]

 
Glad you're still working on this (even after the mishaps). I did a similar build a few years ago. Bending that plexi was too much of a pain to bend, so I changed the design.

Here's the link if you're curious, mine was a wireless xbox 360 fight stick.
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,120404.msg1277239.html#msg1277239

 

[Dan Efran]

Glad you're still working on this (even after the mishaps). I did a similar build a few years ago. Bending that plexi was too much of a pain to bend, so I changed the design.

Yeah, that's similar all right!  I love what you did with the glowing etchings. (I'm a sucker for those. Always pause outside restaurants with those blacklight plexi blackboards.    Um...indeed, even my keychain is hand etched fluorescent plastic.)



(Looks like that one's about due for a Mark II. I made it a long, long time ago, and it's not that great. I still have enough of that orange/pink plastic to make three more of those. Hmm....)

Ahem.  Anyway, getting back to your controller....

That second glow panel is in the back edge window, right? I thought about putting an illuminated window of some kind right about there on mine. So it's good to see what it would look like, roughly. Since I got my plastic bent, I'd put the window behind it and the surface would remain smooth.

I decided not to do that yet - too much else to worry about, and I don't really need glow effects anyway. I sort of have mixed feelings about them, since it's just a control panel after all. But the coin button glows authentically, and the art I put under the plastic is in a sort of TRON-like style, so it strongly evokes the idea of glowing, without actually glowing.



So I figure I've got that covered, more or less.

But...someday maybe. 

That carbon look is pretty cool, and I love how you found a joystick ball to match! ...although the aluminum bat looks 10x better. I just read about those yesterday, and was wondering what context would suit them properly. Wouldn't match my controller at all, but on yours, wow.

[Dan Efran]

Glad you're still working on this (even after the mishaps).

Thanks for the support. 

I knew going into this project that there would be setbacks, particularly around plastic-drilling time. I knew that if I was going to get discouraged and give up, I'd better do it before the project's first cut. Save the materials for something else!

But I decided I had a workable vision, and would just press on through any difficulties. In fact, there have been very few problems so far. Knock on wood.

...I say I decided, but it's really been more of a Dwarf Fortress Strange Mood....

Anyway, on Thursday (April 23 if you're keeping score) I looked more closely at the travel Q-tip box. Alas, too big, and it didn't stay closed at all with even a few coins in it. Useless, but I still get to use the Q-tips.

So I went back to a vitamin bottle as coin receptacle. Cut a slot in the lid. Mounted it in a wooden ring I cut from a scrap board. I happened to have a hole saw that matched the bottle.



You can see I had to carve away some of the center stabilizer board (not a critical part anyway). Not to make room for the bottle itself, but to make room for taking it out and putting it back in.

The next day, I put in some little stop blocks to guide and secure the bottle's lid, which has the (inner) coin slot cut in it. This must be held in the right spot to line up with the external coin slot, of course.



(Also some styrene strips, to guide coins right into the bottle's slot and safely past the reject button's microswitch. Note that these pictures are looking down into the box, which is upside down. So it's perhaps a bit confusing. The coins will fall in and up, relative to these pictures.)

So the ring holds the bottle approximately in place; the stop blocks position the lid and prevent the jar from being pushed in too far and mashing the microswitches.



I mounted all this stuff with hotglue to start out, so I could make adjustments. When I was satisfied with the ring's position I screwed it down.



The tiny little stop blocks are still just hotglued, but I doubt that'll last. I'll switch to something else...when I have to.

I have to manually turn the bottle so that the slot in it is vertical: parallel to the styrene strip guide tongue that sticks into the slot by 1/4" or so.



Emptying the coin bottle is effortless. Pull out the bottle, open it, dump out the coins, close it, and push it back into place, being careful of the slot orientation. (Maybe I should key it somehow, so it only goes in one way. Someday maybe.)

I can do all that with one hand while holding the controller box open with the other.

Now that the internals were mostly finished, I wanted tomostly keep the box floor on, instead of mostly keeping it off. But it's still convenient to take it totally off, so I didn't want to attach it to the hinges yet. That will be one of the last steps in the build.

Someone on the forums here suggested using adhesive velcro instead of hinges...I don't want to do that long term, but as a temporary measure it's ideal. So I did that.

Then it was the weekend. A busy weekend so I only had time for some software setup and testing.

Saturday I tried to set up MAME OS X on the Mac. Didn't get it working, so I moved the controller back to the PC so my son and his friend could try it out with some Joust.

Sunday I set up MaLa on the PC. I hadn't really felt I needed a frontend, but I saw someone else's custom skins on the forums here, and decided I'd better at least have the option of designing a custom menu screen. I chose MaLa because it seemed well trusted, easily skinnable (via an included graphical editor!), and I liked the text effects.

I also tried out, and set up controls for, a few more games.

Assault plays okay with the MiniGrip sticks in 8-way mode, but they really need 4-way restrictors. Which I don't have, but I'm pretty sure I can just make them. Eventually....

My son wanted to help with the tokens, so I let him put one more coat of oil on them. They're ready to use.

Including a few I already had, there are a dozen that fit the coin slot.



Speaking of shiny things, here's the finish I got on my side panels. Don't think I really showed it before.



As I've said before, I didn't have the patience for a car-smooth finish, but I got these surfaces satisfyingly black and shiny.

[Dan Efran]

The next day, I ordered some correctly-sized replacement springs for the Ultimarc E-Stik joysticks. The springs they came with were way too stiff for my taste. I was able to make a temporary replacement with some springs I had on hand that were almost the right size, but I don't want to leave it like that.

I tracked down the same springs mentioned in this thread on the subject:

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,5357.msg35466.html

Home Depot doesn't seem to stock that item in their stores these days, but I found it easily online:

http://www.homedepot.com/p/Prime-Line-1-1-2-in-L-x-1-2-in-D-Compression-Spring-SP-9706/100170388?keyword=SP-9706+spring

They'll ship online purchases to a local store for free, so I ordered a pair.

Actually, I ordered two pairs, because I didn't realize that they come in a package of 2. Oops. But places like Home Depot are used to contractors over-buying supplies and returning what they don't use - it's a fact of life to them - so returning the extras should be no problem. Unless I decide to keep them for some reason....

...I can't think of a reason. I doubt the first pair will ever wear out and I don't plan to add two more E-Stiks.

I started researching MaLa skins - custom layouts - and decided I'd definitely want to make my own.

The following day I made my first custom MaLa skin, incorporating reworked versions of some of my control panel art. Not that great yet, but good enough for now.



Did some more testing. The coin reject button sticks in the pushed-in position sometimes, and the E-Sticks aren't responding in all directions. The stick just isn't pushing some of the microswitch levers far enough.

The day after that, I carefully bent those microswitch levers a tiny bit to improve the joystick response, screwed down the coin bottle's mounting ring, and took out one of the coin-guiding styrene strips. I wasn't 100% satisfied with its position and I thought it might be contributing to the sticky coin reject button. (Nope!)

[Dan Efran]

Here's a picture of those replacement springs I used to soften up the E-Stik joysticks.



Those are working well. The original springs were just way too stiff for my taste. These are the same size but weaker.

Meanwhile, at the end of April it was time to deal with the MiniGrip joysticks, on the other side of the controller. They're 8-way trigger sticks, but I needed them to be 4-way, since they're there for Assault first, and anything else a distant second. Assault just doesn't play properly without smooth physical 4-way restriction.

It almost looks like you can just take apart the MiniGrip's base and rotate the main 8-way plate. If you could mount that rotated, the rounded-square 8-way hole would make a fine rounded-diamond 4-way hole. But none of the mounting holes line up that way, so nope, never mind. In addition to providing an 8-way hole, that plate helps hold the whole joystick together, and it only mounts in one orientation.

A bit of online shopping didn't turn up any 4-way restrictors that would be sure to fit on these sticks. I was half expecting to find a wide range of third-party joystick restrictor plates out there somewhere, but I didn't.

So I decided I'd just make 'em. There were some unused holes and little pegs sticking out of the joystick base, and the joystick shaft protrudes far enough to engage a secondary plate at that elevation. So this was a simple matter of drilling lots of perfectly placed holes in acrylic. 



Conveniently, I had some plastic left over from the control panel's acrylic layer. Enough to make two little squares. (With enough extra to make least one spare, if necessary.)



I used a sharpie to mark the positions of the various pegs, then cut them out very carefully, using the Dremel router.



I had to make a few millimeter-scale adjustments as I went, to make sure everything fit tightly, but it went surprisingly well. I put little registration marks on the edges of the plates, and on the joysticks, so I could keep track of which way they were oriented. (The pegs on the joysticks look nicely symmetrical, but if they weren't perfect, it might be very important to test-fit the holes the same way every time.)



The actual 4-way hole was the hardest part, of course. I started by tracing through the 8-way hole with a pen. That mark wasn't directly usable, but it helped me center the hole and approximate its extent.



Then I traced the 8-way hole again, diagonally, to create a 4-way shape, making sure it was centered on the traced square. Then I simplified that shape to four holes and four straight cuts between them. The Dremel router - used like a drill press - took care of the holes, and I used a jeweler's saw and a file to finish the diamond shape. Not super clean-looking, but with just a few rounds of testing and additional filing, they work perfectly.



The various pegs hold the plate in place pretty snugly, but with heavy use it would probably pop off eventually, if it wasn't secured. I bought some short machine screws and used some matching washers I already had on hand. There were plenty of unused holes in the joystick's original bottom plate; I used the ones in the larger pegs I'd made holes for.

But...those holes in the joystick's pegs weren't threaded. They were smooth.

Fortunately I had a tapping set which included the proper size tap, so fixing that took only a few minutes per hole.

So now these are 4-way joysticks. Yay!  This step was one of the biggest challenges in this project, and a mission-critical one. I'm delighted that it went so smoothly. The modified joysticks now control Assault beautifully. (Of course I can always take these plates off if I want 8-way action for some other game. I don't expect to do that, but it'd be easy.)

[Dan Efran]

It was the last day of April when I fabricated those restrictor plates. It was the first day of May when I mounted them, tapping the mounting holes and filing the openings to the perfect shape.

I also spent a little while experimenting with possible placements for the prop rod that will (in theory) hold the controller open for maintenance and coin removal.

Turns out I'm really running out of space. There's almost no place to put the prop rod where it's got room to swing without chopping any wires.  We'll see.

The next day I did some minor re-positioning and re-gluing of the coin mech's guide strips and stop blocks.

At this point the build was getting very close to finished. Not much left to do.

A few days later, the replacement springs for the E-Stiks arrived, so I installed them. As I mentioned recently, these are working nicely. I'm getting pretty good at dealing with E-clips.

And I set up SDLMAME on the Mac, copying config files from the PC. Chose Attract-Mode as the frontend for Mac because it can use MaLa skins. So I can have what looks like the same frontend on both computers.

The following day I bought a 10-foot USB extension cord at Staples. I'm glad I'd shopped online first: Staples.com had these for about $6, and indicated that my local store had two in stock. When I got there, the shelf tag said - if you can believe it - $28. Sheesh!

I pointed this out at the register. They looked it up online, and agreed to honor the web price. Whew.

Quite a difference! If I hadn't known, I might have paid almost five times as much as necessary. (Actually I wouldn't have! I'd have given up on Staples and bought online from All Electronics, a vendor I've been happy with over the decades. $3 or so for the cable there, plus $8 shipping, and I'd have bought a few other cool things I didn't need while I was there. But someone might be paying that shelf tag price.) Buyer beware, eh?

[Dan Efran]

A small update. About 3 weeks ago, I decided that the side panels were a bit loose. They were wiggling a little, and that kind of thing only gets worse over time. So I added half a dozen more screws to hold them firmly in place. The box is nice and solid now.

This project is about 96% done. "Soon" I'll do the last few steps, then take some pictures.